15 Best ‘Hidden Gem’ WordPress Themes for 2018

Are you looking for a new theme for your WordPress blog or website? Perhaps you want to upgrade from a free theme or change from a theme that isn’t working for you.

The frustration of working with a theme that doesn’t do what you want it to do isn’t worth it.

Well, before you start looking for a theme, you will need to purchase a domain name, and sign up for a WordPress Hosting provider. We recommend SiteGround, since they don’t as much as other hosting providers, plus we have been using them for few of our sites, and always liked their customer support. If you decide to go with SiteGround, don’t forget to use our coupon to get up to 60% off.

Now, back to finding a great theme unlike any other you have ever seen. Because remember, the frustration of working with a theme that doesn’t do what you want it to do isn’t worth it.

There is one way of making a theme completely unique. You could delve into the code, but let’s face it, if you don’t have a coding background, who has time to learn what you need to make tweaks without breaking your site?

Or, you could use a premium theme, one that is highly customizable and gives you the freedom to create your site exactly the way you want it to be. After all, isn’t that just what you need?

This list of WordPress themes contains the hidden gems, the ones not everyone is using (yet!). Have a look and see if you’ve found your next theme.

Here’s the list:

1. The Essence

The Essence tops this list for its beautiful, elegant design, and its versatility. The Essence is up for any task and looks chic doing it. It’s especially suited for feminine blogs or magazines.

The Essence comes equipped with the Meridian Styler, a custom front-end styler. You can use the Meridian Styler to personalize your website to your liking. You’re limited only by your imagination with the Meridian Styler. Change the colors, fonts, spacing, and more, simply and easily.

The Essence also boasts a featured post slider and custom about me, social media, and Instagram widgets.

2. Solopreneur

Solopreneur is a theme designed with bloggers in mind. Sleek. Simple. It’s a no-frills theme that supports your content without making you spend hours fiddling about with how you want it to appear. Its clean design automatically looks good.

Solopreneur is an easy theme to use and customize. It has a widgetized sidebar, which allows you to drag and drop important content blocks into it to catch your audience’s attention.

3. Underwood

Underwood is the perfect mix of masculinity and personality for those looking for a more edgy WordPress theme to build their blog on. Boasting firm lines and bold layouts, Underwood offers you a “no-nonsense” foundation for your website.

As one of the best WordPress themes, Underwood comes lightweight and clean, so you can have a modern and crisp looking website that excels in both speed and performance. In addition, it was built on the strong Bootstrap front-end framework so you can rest assured your theme is HTML compliant.

5. Heart & Style

Heart & Style is a chic magazine theme, that’s bound to win you over. It has all the essential features to make a stunning magazine, news site or content-heavy blog.

Heart & Style boasts multiple layout options to choose from, so it’s easy to pick a style that works for your site. And changing it is just as simple if you decide you need to change things up. The theme also comes with custom widgets that integrate seamlessly into your design.

Heart & Style uses impressively large featured images to attract readers. You’re also able to add clever animations to add a bit of pizazz to your posts.

6. Simple

Simple is a versatile and 100% mobile-friendly WordPress theme ready to showcase your best content. Designed as a one page theme, complete with tons of layouts for making your site unique, Simple has cool parallax background effects, smooth scrolling, and responsive design.

Add a stunning slideshow with bold imagery top grab site visitors’ attention and even take advantage of the available cust9m widgets for added site functionality. Lastly, customize the look of your website to match your brand using the intuitive color, complete with endless color options.

9. Noah

Noah is a bold WordPress photography theme, perfect for photographers and those who want to tell their story with striking visuals.

The first thing you’ll notice about Noah is the elegant grid-based layout and the large, stunning images. Noah is designed to hero images. And it doesn’t stop with just displaying them beautifully. With Noah, you also get great transition effects that add a touch of drama and the option to create a full-screen slider as your header to display your best work.

Noah also boasts plenty of customization options so you can tailor your site to your liking – you can adjust colors, have access to 600+ fonts, and can easily change the spacing and layout of the modular design.

10. Hype

Need a theme to showcase your work? And sell it at the same time? Look no further than Hype. This theme is beautifully designed, powered by ZillaCommerce, and is highly customizable to boot.

Hype is full of features to help you sell your work. The homepage has dedicated space for testimonials, clients, recent news, and your blog. All you need to do is add your own content. You can also choose to display your portfolio on your home page, either all your work or a curated selection.

11. Lenscap

Lenscap is a stunning theme capable of powering a magazine, blog site, or e-commerce store with equal finesse.

Showcase your best content for your visitors with the fullwidth featured content carousel at the top of your homepage. It’s simple to keep your carousel content up to date as well – set up a tag for your posts you want on the carousel and it’ll automatically happen.

Lenscap also has powerful options for displaying your multimedia content in a lightbox. Add an image, a video, or a gallery, and display it front and center.

12. Attitude

Attitude is an attractive theme for displaying your multimedia portfolio.

Attitude is highly customizable. You can change colors, fonts, style, and more with ease. Another feature it has is unlimited sidebars, so you can set custom sidebars to display for different content. And if you don’t need that feature, you can simply stick with the defaults.

Attitude’s code is clean, well-commented and valid. It’s also search engine optimized for easier rankings with the search engines.

Lastly, if you’ve already got a portfolio site, it’s easy to migrate it over to Attitude. The ST Toolkit is compatible with post types, categories, and tags, so if your previous theme used custom post types, switching is simple.

Key Features:

It’s easy to migrate to the Attitude theme

Highly customizable theme

Mobile responsive design, looks great on smartphones, tablets, and computers

13. Motive

Motive is a versatile theme choice. You have several options for your homepage, including a grid layout, single image, or text focus. Or you can have a mixture of all three.

Motive supports multimedia and boasts several multimedia post types, such as images, galleries, audio, and visuals. This theme is highly customizable and lets you pick your colors at will. It also comes with built-in SEO settings to help you optimize your content for better search engine rankings.

14. Point Pro

Point Pro is another stunning magazine theme that’s an excellent choice for a magazine, news site, or blog. You’ve got loads of options with Point Pro including color customization options and a plethora of layout options. Point Pro also has drag and drop page building so you can easily customize your site layout to your exact specifications.

Point Pro boasts an off canvas menu which stays hidden until needed. This keeps the focus on your content without distraction. PointPro also comes with an eye-catching fullwidth slider that can display a category of posts to keep your readers engaged.

15. Baseline

Baseline is a versatile and flexible theme choice for a stunning blog, magazine, or website.

The theme comes with a prominent Featured Content Carousel that places your best content (as selected by you) at the top of your page drawing the attention of your visitors. Baseline also includes a header category menu for easy navigation, your last five posts in each category are instantly displayed.

Baseline boasts multiple layout options so you can choose the one that suits your content best. It also offers infinite scroll, perfect for content-rich sites.

16. ionMag

Another free entry to the list – ionMag is an exceptional magazine WordPress theme. It’s professional, stylish, and bold. Perfect for a magazine site, or simply a content-heavy blog.

Unlike most free themes, ionMag comes with a front end visual builder. This builder allows you to use drag and drop elements to build your own pages. This is a feature that usually only makes an appearance in premium themes.

This theme also comes with several custom widgets, including Social Counter, Instagram, Author Box widgets, and more.

17. Grimag

Grimag is a sleek and professional magazine theme that focuses on monetizing your site with ad revenue. Grimag gives you built-in space for ads in optimal positions and provides responsive AdSense units, so you won’t have problems with broken formatting.

The sticky post feature allows you to highlight your best content for your readers and the large featured images draw attention.

You’ve also got access to a ton of custom widgets and customization options. Colors, fonts, styles, sidebar content, you can change it all to your liking and build the site you want.

18. Risa

A minimalist theme, Risa will showcase your content without distractions. The developers, Fancy Themes, wanted to reduce clutter and have trimmed Risa down to include only the essential elements.

If you find the endless customization options of most themes to be overwhelming and you just want a classic-looking site, Risa is a great choice. That’s not to say you can’t customize Risa, you can, it just isn’t to quite the extent of some of the other themes on this list.